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Work crews repair power lines in Freehold after Sandy and the subsequent nor'easter. / MARK R. SULLIVAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Workers from Atlantic City Electric and Alabama Power work to restore lines in the Tuckerton Beach section of Tuckerton. / PETER ACKERMAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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Superstorm Sandy lashed New Jersey a little over a month ago, snapping tree limbs, power lines and utility poles, plunging the Jersey Shore into a darkness that lasted two weeks for some.

On a grand scale, it showed the might of Mother Nature and how it can affect one thing that’s so easy to take for granted: electricity. People lined up for hours at gasoline stations, clutching cans and containers to fill up and fuel portable generators.

Sure, we’ve had storms and hurricanes that knocked out power for many days, but to have thousands of customers in areas devastated by Sandy still without power a month later? No way.

In the coming months, the state’s regulatory agency, the Board of Public Utilities, and New Jersey’s utilities, including Jersey Central Power & Light, surely will ask questions about what to do next. Are there ways to protect the electric grid, the series of power lines, substations and wires that connect your house to the juice?

Spring Lake resident Donna Ferrante was without electricity for eight days after Sandy.

“To me, I think they did the best they could as far as trying to respond,” Ferrante said. “But you know in order to prepare, to prevent this in the future, I think they have to take some of their money and not give it to the stockholders and put it back into the infrastructure, because it obviously is outdated.”

Press on Your Side thought it was a question worth asking. Just what can the state and its utilities do? Several potential options come to mind. How about burying electric lines in the ground? Will tougher utility poles help?

Whatever the outcome, New Jersey’s ratepayers will pay for it eventually through higher rates.

Colossal storm

First here’s a reminder about the magnitude of Sandy.

Sandy knocked out power to 10 million customers, from houses to office buildings, in the northeast U.S., according to the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington D.C.-based trade group representing publicly traded utilities. As a comparison, Irene in 2011 hit 7 million customers, Katrina in 2005 about 2 million.

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“Sandy was the biggest restoration event of electric utilities in history. There is no question about that,” said Jim Fama, vice president of energy delivery at the Edison Electric Institute. “This is a big one.”

At its peak, Sandy turned the lights out to 1.2 million JCP&L customers. including more than 469,000 in Monmouth and Ocean counties. Over the next two weeks or so, the utility, aided by 8,500 linemen from around the country, worked to turn them back on.

Still, about 14,000 customers remain without electricity in the areas of the Jersey Shore hardest hit by Sandy, the utility said last week.

What can utilities do to prevent outages? You’ll never see an electric system that never has an outage. “The price of electricity would be so high as to be unaffordable to the average person,” Fama said.

Utilities and regulatory agencies try to strike a balance: protect electric equipment and the ability to restore power quickly after an outage.

Burying lines

Since 1999, states including Florida, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia as well as the District of Columbia, have studied the idea of burying electric lines following major storms.

It’s an expensive proposition. Moving electric lines underground can cost as much as $2.13 million a mile in a city, or $832,383 on average, according to a 2009 study by the Edison Electric Institute. The average cost in a suburban area runs $723,692 per mile while the average price tag in a rural area is $395,874 per mile.

Overhead wires are cheaper, costing on average $196,629 per mile to run in urban areas, $193,850 in suburban areas and $135,307 in rural parts, the study said.

When does it work?

Underground wires and equipment are not immune from damage. In Florida, for instance, some underground facilities in a beach area sustained damage after so much sand and land was washed away they weren’t underground anymore, Fama said.

In New York City, Sandy flooded lower Manhattan and ruined underground systems. “If they get wet, (if) they flood, they are a lot harder to restore than overhead wires that get knocked down by a tree,” said Paul Flanagan, litigation manager at the New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel, which represents ratepayers in cases before the BPU.

New housing developments, including many in New Jersey, have underground electrical systems. That doesn’t mean they are immune from outages, especially when the overhead high-voltage line feeding the underground system goes down.

“It is the lowest cost when you are building a new subdivision,” Flanagan said.

Underground systems can work in more urban areas, but more rural and suburban systems tend to be above the street.

But sometimes it may be worth considering it as an option.

What about a stretch of wires which either have a lot of trees or lack network redundancies?

“You might want to, in those circumstances, look at it and decide whether or not you want to go underground,” Flanagan said. “You are going to weigh the costs of doing that versus fixing them, even if you fix them more frequently.”

Putting the electric network underground comes with some immediate costs for homeowners. The service line, which sends the electricity from the street to your house, also goes underground, Flanagan said. That means either drilling under the garden and patio or digging a trench.

“To say you are going to do it for an entire town of a couple thousand homes, there’s a price involved with that, but there’s also, I would expect, some serious pushback from some of the residents,” Flanagan said.

Fortifying substations

In the coming months, with the help of researchers at Rutgers University, regulators will look at various issues spawned by Sandy, such as substations that flooded and whether they should be moved or further fortified, BPU spokesman Greg Reinert said.

“Undergrounding may be one of those subjects,” Reinert said.

Besides the expense, underground systems can be harder to fix, JCP&L spokesman Ron Morano said. “Sometimes finding a fault with something underground is more difficult,” he said.

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Finding locations, digging up roads and laying underground cables also are issues that make it difficult, Morano said.

But along with the BPU, the utility will be looking at ways it can harden its electric system, including new technology designed to improve storm response, smart-grid technology pilot projects, and targeted right-of-way-improvements for the distribution system, JCP&L said Friday.

The state’s largest public utility, Public Service Electric and Gas, said strategies for improving reliability during storms should include smart meters, which can allow for remote meter reading or outage reports, and improved vegetation management, to make sure windblown trees aren’t slamming into wires.

“As part of our plan to strengthen our infrastructure, we’ll analyze the effectiveness of whether it might make sense to bury some overhead lines to increase reliability,” PSE&G spokeswoman Bonnie J. Sheppard said. “It’s extremely costly to do so, of course, but for some portion of the system it might make sense.”

Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, said the state’s utilities missed their chance to make a difference by starting to put wires underground years ago. “Had we been doing it, even in a piecemeal event over 30 years, we would have a lot of our lines underground right now.”

But the process can start now, he said. Lines should be buried in vulnerable areas where they come down often, Tittel said. “Something is wrong when the lines are coming down three times in 14 months,” he said.

Substations that are located in areas that flood should be moved, he said. “Everyone is rushing to go back to normal, but we don’t have that normal anymore,” Tittel said. “The new normal is we have to protect this vulnerable infrastructure from storm surge and flood and trees.”